Stay on target

Yes, most of us know Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, royal badass in Star Wars. We were introduced to her this way as children, and that remains her most iconic role. However, the actress is multi-faceted, not just emoting and holding a gun in front of the camera, but doing just about everything else.

It seems as if Fisher has dabbled in a lot of fields. She’s been working for decades, and while she’s stirred up some public controversies, and struggled with drug addiction and mental illness (more on this later), she’s managed to try different things and contribute to many different areas of the entertainment industry. She’s the definition of #lifegoals.

Courtesy Riccardo Ghilardi via Wikimedia Commons

Script Doctor

George Lucas’ work almost always benefits from the input of others, and that stems back to the original Star Wars films. The three main players–Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill–had a say in the dialogue. As the movies progressed, the actors had more say in what they said, including Fisher. She refers to this as one of her first script-writing jobs.

The first script she worked on fully was the adaptation of her semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge, which pulled from her struggles with drug addiction. It starred Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine and was praised for its writing and dialogue by critics such as Roger Ebert, who said that while the second half falls off in quality, it “contains too much good writing and too many good performances to be a failure.”

It was following the script that Fisher was brought on to fix the dialogue and writing on a number of high-profile screenplays in the 1990s and early 2000s. While you’ll almost never find her name in the credits, she’s attached to Hook, Sister Act, The Wedding Singer, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and even the Star Wars prequels. She worked with actors and studios behind the scenes, helping Whoopi Goldberg and Disney executives get along for the sake of Sister Act

This is one of those Hollywood legends that has become more public in recent years. It’s not that she was being actively hidden. It was well-known in the industry, which is how she was able to get work on Steven Spielberg films and other mainstream, big budget releases. It’s a shame that Fisher didn’t get any credit during the time when she was busiest, especially since, as she says, the process changed to her detriment over the years, essentially pushing her out of the industry. However, her mark is on many iconic films, so in a way, she’ll always be around.

Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show at Studio 54 on Broadway.

Novelist and Playwright

As previously mentioned, Fisher wrote about her experiences with drug abuse in the bestseller Postcards from the Edge, but she didn’t stop there and wrote even more books based on her life. Surrender The Pink was about her relationship with Paul Simon. The Best Awful There Is is thought to be about her relationship with agent Bryan Lourd, who came out as homosexual years into their courtship.

Wishful Thinking combined her loves of writing and acting into a one-woman play, which toured the country in 2006 and 2007 and did a short stint on Broadway. That was adapted into a book in 2008, and the audiobook earned her a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word album.

Her writing is always quick and self-aware. Her life experiences are strange and absurd enough to most readers to serve as entertainment, but the amount of herself she puts into her work makes it more intimate. This has worked to her disadvantage in some of the critical reception, but her honesty about her life and her struggles, and the way she is able to make fun of them, has always made her endearing to her audience.

And as she’s gotten older, she’s gotten more open, which brings us to one of her greatest achievements.

Mental Health Activist

Fisher was diagnosed with bipolar disorder on top of struggling with drug addiction famously in the 1980s (she was often seen doing drugs with John Belushi, who died of a drug overdose in 1982). She’s been open about her diagnosis and her medication use, which is still a taboo in 2016. She’s been open about how her struggles to find a proper chemical balance has caused her to have psychotic breaks, including some very public, headline-grabbing ones.

For example, she became the subject of gossip in 2013 after suffering a manic episode on a cruise ship, that was captured on video.

She’s gone on 20/20, Extra and the BBC to discuss her illness, which she often does with a frankness that few people have.

“There is treatment and a variety of medications that can alleviate your symptoms if you are manic depressive or depressive,” Fisher said in 2002. “You can lead a normal life, whatever that is. I have gotten to the point where I can live a normal life, where my daughter can rely on me for predictable behavior, and that’s very important to me.”

She’s received a number of awards for her work and honesty about her mental illness, including a lifetime achievement award from the Humanist Hub at Harvard in 2016. She is one of the most famous spokespeople for bipolar disorder, a subject that is very important to her due to the stigma and the lack of knowledge surrounding the disease.

“What happens with the insurance companies, they don’t cover you for a physical illness and a mental illness. You have to pick,” she told Newsweek.”Obviously you’re going to pick a heart medication over a mental illness one. That’s asking people to make a tough choice.”

Outspoken, Amazing Human Being

Being an amazing person isn’t the most lucrative part of her public career, but it’s one of the things that endears us the most. She’s a nerd icon, so for that she’ll always be on our minds, but her candor on politics and the issues facing women in Hollywood is refreshing. Her Twitter is a goldmine of sharp comedy, quotes, and puppies, of course, but her appearances on talk shows, especially now that Star Wars is once again making her a household name, is always welcome.

She’s spoken out against body shamers who criticized her look during the promoting for The Force Awakens, for instance, and never seems to let it hurt her. She’s been in this industry for decades and dealt with worse than some trolls online, so she doesn’t have the patience to let it affect her. Of course, she’s been open about her insecurities as well.

She’s a treasure. Every time she appears on our screens, she makes us smile and clap. She’s incredibly smart, funny, and knows herself so well. She’s an inspiration, and we hope to one day be as cool as her.

“I haven’t ever changed who I am. I’ve just gotten more accepting of it. Being happy isn’t getting what you want, it’s wanting what you have,” she said.